Indian police have asked YouTube and Facebook to block a video that mocks cricket great Sachin Tendulkar, sparking the country’s latest row over freedom of expression.

Comedian Tanmay Bhat posted the clip, which also lampooned famous Indian movie singer Lata Mangeshkar, on Snapchat and Facebook on Thursday, angering rightwing politicians in Mumbai who complained to police.

Police in the western Indian city received two complaints – one from a local politician belonging to Narendra Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata party who said the clip was defamatory.

The other was from Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a fringe pro-Marathi party in Mumbai, which is the capital of Maharashtra state, force spokesman Sangramsingh Nishandar said.

“We have sought a legal opinion. In the meantime we have written to YouTube and Facebook to block the above-mentioned video,” Nishandar said.

In the two-minute clip – titled Sachin vs Lata Civil War – Bhat, a member of online comedy group AIB, mimics an argument between Tendulkar and Mangeshkar using Snapchat’s Face Swap feature.

At one point Bhat, acting as Tendulkar, tells Mangeshkar she is “5,000 years old”.

He also says the singer, who is 86, looked like she’d been kept in water for eight days and suggests she should die.

Bhat posted a comment with the video describing it as “nonsense”.

“Also I obviously love Lata and Sachin, just having some fun,” he wrote.

AIB fell foul of authorities last year when they were at the centre of an obscenity investigation over some sexually explicit jokes in a comedy “roast” show featuring several Bollywood stars.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has long been proud of its tradition of artistic, cultural and religious freedoms but a series of bans recently sparked accusations of a growing climate of intolerance under Hindu nationalist prime minister Modi.